Archive of thenextweb.com
Written on 2nd September 2008
1 COMMENT 
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Two weeks ago, I celebrated the launch of Yahoo Buzz, the social media service that would “blow up our servers”. Inspired by a success story of TechCrunch, I switched all Digg’s vote buttons for those of Yahoo’s brand new social news project.
Turns out this was a pretty useless move. Since August 20, StumbleUpon has sent us 4,581 visitors, Digg 1,183, Hacker’s News 679, and Buzz.., well, it brought us 38 visitors.
Ok, so every social media service might need some time to become successful. That’s all good. But it’s not ok that Buzz also asks for some more time to load our page. See this horrifying graphic of how the images on our site load, you don’t want that to happen to your blog:
See that shiny button? It’s our way of saying thank you
So now what? Well, I’ve endorsed StumbleUpon before, as they are the only service that keeps sending new possible readers to our blog. Moreover, it isn’t a service that ignores 158 votes from our readers, like Digg did last week. We’re thankful for that, and therefore decided to give the SU button a more prominent spot. Happy stumbling folks!
Written on 19th August 2008
4 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
If you’re following other tech blogs, you probably can’t help noticing that everybody is raving about Yahoo Buzz. The Digg-like service – which grants possibile access to a mention on the Yahoo! frontpage – is now open to every web publisher. This is something a lot of people have been waiting for, since spectacular stories about millions of incoming clicks from Yahoo! have been buzzing around for a while.
Former TechCrunch editor Nick Gonzalez told us during the San Francisco edition of Web 2.0 Expo that a mention on Yahoo’s frontpage brought in an “insane amount of traffic”. This happened with a post by Duncan Riley about Japanese Internet service providers that wanted to ban file sharers from the Internet. Gonzalez: “Somebody buzzed the story, and somebody else did as well. It ended up at the Yahoo front page, which leads to around 300,000 clicks per second. That’s a crap load of users”.
Although some people say the numbers Gonzalez mentioned are impossible, the fact still is that your post “being buzzed” is an impressive example of what social media can do.
Forget about Digg’s pimple faces
So let’s forget about Digg. I’ve removed the Digg button from its excellent position and replaced it with the Buzz voting tool. Sure, we got on the Digg frontpage twice (1, 2), but after all, those incoming Digg clicks are from 2.7 million pimple faces anyway.
Want to have a Buzz button on your blog as well?
Browse to this page and make a selection. If you have a Wordpress blog as well, you’ll need to insert the following code:
<script type=”text/javascript”>yahooBuzzArticleHeadline = “<?php the_title(); ?>”;yahooBuzzArticleCategory = “Sci/Tech”;yahooBuzzArticleType = “text”;yahooBuzzArticleId =”<?php the_permalink() ?>”;</script><script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://d.yimg.com/ds/badge2.js” badgetype=”small-votes”></script>
Written on 1st July 2008
1 COMMENT
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
While the Netvibes blog still triumphs the neat integration with Google Search, TechCrunch reports that a new – and more exciting – feature has launched. It’s called Buzz and it adds Digg, Mixx, Reddit and Yahoo – uhm – Buzz to its impressive list of competitors (featuring iGoogle and MyAOL). In case you haven’t noticed yet, there’s a “star” function in Netvibes, with which you can highlight your favorite articles. Buzz will track which articles are starred most – by your friends or everyone – and by doing this, gives a Digg-like overview of the Web 2.0’s most favorite articles.
My first thought was: yet another sharing tool. But then I realized that Netvibes might become an “starring overlay” for all your content, as the little star is depicted in YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Digg, RSS, and almost every other content widget you can come up with. So instead of turning tweets in a Twitter fav, starring articles on Google Reader and appreciating Digg articles by digging them, you just have one tool to manage all your highlight needs.
Before this scenario becomes reailty, Netvibes Buzz has to come a long way. It’s still in development and the numbers on the frontpage aren’t that impressive.
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